2016-24: In the quiet of the voting booth
- Melissa Herrera: Not Waiting for Friday
- September 22, 2024
- 1194
I’m revisiting a column from eight years ago. It feels eerily like how I’m feeling today. By now I’ve voted in nine presidential elections, headed toward the 10th. Since I wrote this, I have voted absentee and voted early. I like early voting and will probably do that this year in my new precinct. We’re about six weeks out from the Nov. 5 Election Day. Where and how will you vote?
I’ve voted in seven presidential elections. We registered in government class, carefully filling out paper forms and passing them forward to be taken to the Holmes County Board of Elections. Many found government class to be dull, full of boring processes and things that caused a teen to bob a drowsy head and sleep. I enjoyed the lectures and interactive conversations that would reveal tiny bits of a person and their leanings — a window inside someone’s thoughts. I discovered we were all gloriously different.
When November came the following year, I rolled up to the tiny yellow brick building in uptown Berlin and cast my vote. I remember feeling important, as if my vote alone really stood for something, a cog in the wheel of American politics. That year my candidate won.
In my fuzzy younger years, I remember the TV being on when important political things were happening. One of my earlier memories is watching Richard Nixon step down as president, not that I knew exactly what was happening. I can see his face as he talked on the screen, as I played on the floor doing whatever little kids do. It’s an indelible image I’ve retained through the years. In second grade we voted in our class in the fall, by ballot, and picked the president for the year of 1976.
I must have paid attention somewhere or been reading the newspapers that arrived at our house daily because the person I voted for did not win in my classroom. A sinking feeling pervaded me as my classmates cheered their mock election winner. I felt left out, kind of alone, knowing I had chosen someone other than who the majority had voted for. But when November came around, my candidate won the election and became the president of the United States. It was a lesson, a study if you will, on listening to your heart and knowing you don’t have to be cool and vote a certain way because everyone else did.
We didn’t talk much politics at home, but newspapers and nightly news kept us informed better than any 24-hour news channel ever could. I never felt it took over the household conversation, and out in public no one ever talked about candidates and whether you were good or bad voting a certain way; it never seemed a “moral” choice.
Was I too young to understand that type of decorum? I don’t think so. I was an early, early reader, and comprehension of information and things came to me easily. I devoured newspapers as well as books as thick as my arm at the age of 6. And as my dad sold the Cleveland Plain Dealer off the back of his pickup truck, the sections — as we put them together — flashed fascinating information to be inhaled over the years until he stopped selling them. Out there, over coffee and 5 a.m. doughnuts at the local restaurants, I’m sure much hashing of political candidates took place; arguments and good-natured differences were played out. Those were the things I couldn’t know, but I maintain it was a softer, more genteel era than we have playing out now.
I’ve voted in seven presidential elections. This Tuesday will be my eighth. I’ve never voted early; I never had a reason to. I like the act of doing my civic responsibility on the given day. I’ll get in my car and drive up to my polling place and walk inside. I will sign my name and be handed a card to slide into the machine. There will be no one in the voting booth but me and my thoughts, mingled and mixed as they have been over this election season, but Election Day my thoughts will be calm.
It’s been one for the ages, and I wish I could go back to government class where there was civility among teenagers, back to second grade where we cast secret ballots and no one hated the other for their choice, where when you stared down at a blank piece of paper and carefully scribbled a well-considered name, you knew it was your choice and yours alone.
I will remember those moments when I enter the booth and exhale, breathing deeply to take my part in the political process. The rhetoric and vitriol will fade away when I scroll through the names and press my finger on the screen and cast my vote. Because that’s just it — it’s my vote.